The Manichean view of Cortázar's oeuvre regarding the division between his apolitical versus political texts is largely reflected in the critical writing on his early works. For example, Graciela Maturo, in her analysis, Julio Cortázar y el hombre nuevo, provides a detailed description of Divertimento and El examen, yet she makes no tangible connection between these novels and politics or, more specifically, Peronism. Likewise, regarding the short stories in Bestiario, Mercedes Rein asserts that ‘no se justifica demasiado una interpretación metafísica, menos aún […] una interpretación ética o política de esos cuentos’. Continuing in this vein, Alfred Mac Adam states, in the introduction to his own English translation of El examen, that throughout the 1940s and 1950s Cortázar remained ‘apolitical’, and that El examen is ‘above all a novel about Buenos Aires’. In other words, it is apparent that the critical studies of the works written in this period follow and repeat the assertion that the political element in Cortázar became noticeable only after his conversion to socialism. However, this chapter will show that even the first steps that Cortázar took into the fictional realm were, in several respects, unequivocally political.